Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for his maser work, and Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his laser work. Maiman received many accolades, but never the Nobel Prize. Nor was the Nobel Prize awarded to Gordon Gould, but that's another, sad story. Gould is remembered mainly for patent litigation, rather than his physics.

The Townes ammonia maser amplified microwave signals at about 24 gigahertz. Working at those frequencies was quite an accomplishment in 1954. Masers using other gases, particularly hydrogen, were useful for amplifying signals used by interplanetary probes. Since there were limited applications for masers, and the technical requirements for maser operation are rather extreme, they drifted into the background as their sibling lasers took over the world.

The idea came about when Mark Oxborrow, an NPL physicist, was inspired by an old publication by some Japanese scientists who speculated that the electrons in pentacene could be excited by a laser to produce a maser. He borrowed some pentacene and crystallized it with p-terphenyl into a pink crystal several centimeters long.[5]

The laser source was a medical laser purchased on eBay and transported from a North London warehouse. Oxborrow admits that there's much room for material improvement. He slightly decomposed the organic solution while heating, but the imperfect crystal still worked.[5]

The performance of this maser far outstrips its predecessors. Early masers could only produce a few nanowatts of power when operated as oscillators. The pentacene maser has an output power of -10 dBm (0.1 milliwatt), which is 100,000 times more powerful.[4] Neil Alford, Head of the Department of Materials at Imperial College London and a co-author of the Nature paper announcing this discovery, says

"When LASERs were invented no one quite knew exactly how they would be used and yet, the technology flourished to the point that LASERs have now become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. We've still got a long way to go before the MASER reaches that level, but our breakthrough does mean that this technology can literally come out of the cold and start becoming more useful."[6]

At present, this maser works only in pulsed mode, for just a few fractions of a second for each pulse. The goal is to produce a continuous maser, perhaps consuming less power, and operable over a range of frequencies.[6] The maser team will also investigate other materials that might work in their maser device.[6] One application would be as an amplifier for radio astronomy. This maser research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the UK's National Measurement Office.[6]